"During the following months I fall in love with the idea of creating a series of notebooks using real, nice maps for its design. I wanted to keep the abstract beauty of the contour lines but, at the same time, respect the old tradition for accuracy that cartography has, without incurring in an incredibly time-consuming process."

"Kizhner is a graduate student from Hadassah College in Jerusalem, who describes herself as "a trend theorist that is looking to define the new black -- practicing everyday escapism". Kizhner explains on her website that Energy Addicts, her final year project, "seeks to deal with questions of how to see the world, based primarily on biological energy and what the meaning of biological capital is when the accrual is contingent on biological data"."

"It is a year after my first trial at Possible Futures Festival at Vooruit 100, of serving the extremely invasive plant Japanese knotweed that fortuitously happen to taste of rhubarb, as cakes. Enabled by the management of Timelab and participating in launching the Flemish Food Council, I wanted to reframe invasive species as local delicacies. After much awaiting, the project has finally managed to match a sustainable source of invasive raw knotweed ingredients to supply for the Cake artisan Julie’s House."

"...although Marko had been working on the book for a while, its final stages of development would end up coinciding with the sale of Nokia's devices and services division to Microsoft. So the book would also be destined to serve as a kind of informal footnote to a defining modern era—the first wave of mainstream mobile phones, led by Nokia, which has left a mark on pretty much all of us."

“It’s a document called “NEW BRITISH MODERN”, fleshing out the aesthetic foundations for Little Printer, and very directly sketching out the product as an outcome of Britishness. Not in a “James Bond and the Queen in a helicopter” kind of way, but more subtly, with colour palettes, forms, conditions. As a document, it’s partly just the flotsam from a design process but it’s also an extraordinary act of curation, almost the DNA of what would be a great exhibition. It’s images and movies peppered with little notes-to-self like “calm radii, human forms but industrial processes, little tapers, warm earthy oranges, geometric but not cold …”, annotating a roll-call of reference points, drawing freely from the last century, and which if not all strictly British in provenance, certainly are in influence. Some of it predictable, some of it unlikely, all of it poetically accreting to build a highly consistent yet rich identity.”

"Futurematic is a design jam to fill a vending machine with artifacts from the future. Participants will conceptualize and execute designs for the objects, focusing mostly on packaging design and rapid prototyping as ways of exploring possible futures. The jam will also include an opportunity to play the Situation Lab’s brand-new imaginary objects card game, “The Thing from the Future.”"

Over the course of a year, I researched and created ZXX, a disruptive typeface which takes its name from the Library of Congress’ listing of three-letter codes denoting which language a book is written in. Code “ZXX” is used when there is: “No linguistic content; Not applicable.” The project started with a genuine question: How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them? I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker) — misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all. It can be applied to huge amounts of data, or to personal correspondence. I drew six different cuts (Sans, Bold, Camo, False, Noise and Xed) to generate endless permutations, each font designed to thwart machine intelligences in a different way. I offered the typeface as a free download in hopes that as many people as possible would use it.

"“Snowfall” has become a verb in many newsrooms after The New York Times launched its beautiful multimedia project earlier this year. Though the format was touted as the future of online storytelling by some, The Times wasn’t the first to pull of this type of format. If you’re looking for inspiration to make snow fall in your own newsroom, here are a few other examples, not all of which come from newsrooms, as I think it would be irresponsible of us to confine ourselves to the sphere of news organizations when collecting inspiration for innovative storytelling formats."

"I am a Canadian that studied industrial design. It’s not surprising that I often got strange looks when I told people about my thesis project to redesign America’s voting system. The reason is simple though - I find America to be an amazing and fascinating nation and also like exploring the diverse applications of industrial design thinking. The 2012 election was the first time I experienced an American election first hand. I found it to be absolutely exciting and intriguing. I loved it." This is, as all his posts are, beautiful and interesting. It is also full-on Bigend-Draperism -- control through the emotional leverage of nostalgia. Quite brilliant.

"Q U B E is a handmade Rubik’s Cube with QR-Codes – a physical object that links to pages containing digital content: videos, audio files (music!), images and text. The idea here was to reintroduce some form of physical, human, ‘hands-on’ engagement with post-physical content, rather than pander to the ubiquity of one-finger DOWNLOAD culture."

"The workshop started with two briefs. The first examined the book cover: its purpose in the old world of bricks-and-mortar bookshops and bookshelves, and its new place online and embedded in devices, more avatar than wrapper for the book. The second looked at the problems of navigating a long-form electronic text, without the ability to thumb and spatially conceive of a solid block of paper."

"What I like about the publication is the way it uses its large pages to reproduce smaller magazine-sized pages. The contents page, above, shows how they play with this; the contents listings have been annotated beyond the edges of the reproduced ‘magazine’ by Bruce Weber."

"I’m fine with the usual engineer trope of saying something’s impossible, and then going away and doing it. I expect that; in fact, I’ve even grown to look forward to that happening on a project, as confirmation that what I’m trying to do is far enough out the difficulty curve to be interesting. What I do not get is why some people seemed so offended by what we were trying to do with PERRY that they’d invest time and energy in trying to convince us it wasn’t worth the effort."

"However, one thing has changed: designers can now take power into their own hands. Burbayev gave me two incredible examples. In 2007 the Russian central bank held a competition to design a symbol for the ruble, which has never had one. Instead of waiting for the government to choose, 26 of the best design firms in Russia chose a design among themselves, and agreed to make it a contractual obligation to use it as the symbol for the ruble in their work. It is now the de facto symbol for the currency, even though the government has never authorised it. Similarly, frustrated by the state of the Moscow subway map, which is ungainly and out-of-date (13 new stops have opened since it was designed), the Art Lebedev Studio created its own, and provided a free downloadable version to anyone who wanted to publish it. Consequently, it now appears in all kinds of guidebooks; but when metro staff are asked for a copy they are completely nonplussed. Which must be rather satisfying for the rebel designers. Where the bureaucrats once held an omnipotent grip on design, designers of the post-Soviet era have learned to turn the tables on them. From which we can conclude one of two things: either getting things done in new Russia means resorting to piratical tactics, or, with a free market and the internet, good design is just difficult to keep down."

"So, the Adaptive Journey service I describe isn’t possible at the moment, because you can’t get at the user data without breaking TfL’s terms and conditions. Nevertheless, the “We see you’re doing this, perhaps you’d find it better to do that” design pattern is a powerful one, if used properly." Yeah, crossref with @TowerBridge there, Ben. good read, though.

"Set in the deserted grounds of Paypal founder Elon Musk’s Space X jet lab in Hawthorne, California, the film was inspired by the pioneering spirit of the space race, which, according to Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy, “has defined generations of artists in their desire to use new mediums and question the established rules they were taught to follow.” This cinematic collision between rocket science and visual daring is an apt match for Rodarte’s spring 2010 collection—a symphony of flesh-colored crochet knits, fluorescent fibres, leather bandages and distressed plaid. Costumed in a series of these exquisite creations, Van Seenus blurrily emerges from a shimmering seascape before running through the starkly alluring spaces of the Space X facility... Van Seenus’ hallucinatory journey, punctuated by glimpses of mysterious experiments and sudden rocket blasts, is chillingly soundtracked by LA noise-merchants No Age."

"Denton acknowledged that his numbers have in fact suffered due to the makeover, which abandoned the standard reverse-chronological scroll of blogs for a more traditional layout in which a single story dominates the homepage."